Blog Posts

Many of us working on the library systems side already know about Primo Central index. For those who don’t, here is an excerpt from Ex Libris’s official site. The Primo Central index is a mega-aggregation of hundreds of millions of scholarly e-resources of global and regional importance. These include journal articles, e-books, reviews, legal documents and more that are harvested from primary and secondary publishers and aggregators, and from open-access repositories. Ex Libris works with the world’s leading providers of global and regional information to benefit its customer community. The Primo Central index fully exploits the richness of the underlying data to facilitate fast and easy search. Oxford went live with Primo Central in September 2010. We made Primo Central index part of our resource discovery platform SOLO based on Ex Libris’s Primo, and introduced it as a new tab called “Journal Articles (beta) [Now called Articles & More]” . We tagged it as beta, because we still believe that there are areas where Primo Central is not as comprehensive as it could be, e.g. Law resources. We also provided a brief description of the limitations and the advantages of Primo Central on SOLO’s home page so that people don’t think …

Primo, the Ex Libris resource discovery platform, provides an architecture to write plug-ins on top of it. One of these plug-ins is the Enrichment plug-in. I have recently written one of these plug-ins, which enhances Oxford’s resource discovery platform called SOLO (based on Primo). The plug-in searches Nielsen data against every record in Primo and enriches the record (more precisely record’s PNX) with table of contents, short descriptions and long descriptions (whichever available). The enriched data is displayable and searchable. Nielsen data is indexed in Apache’s Solr search server and request for the data are made through a web service call from within the plug-in. More details about the plug-in along with source code and installation instructions can be found here. http://www.exlibrisgroup.org/display/PrimoCC/Nielsen+Enrichment+Plug-in+for+Primo

I was asked to write a small shell script which can read the difference of two files (which extracts filenames) and pass the extracted filenames to another shell script. It is not too complicated but posting it for other people’s benefit. Here is a quick explanation. Line 5 takes a difference of files file1.txt and file2.txt, cuts the output from characters 3 to 13, and writes it into a file. Line 7 opens temporarylist.txt as file descriptor 3 for reading. Line 9 runs a loop till there is nothing further to read from file descriptor 3. Line 11 passes the read data to a different shell script (named othershellscript in this case). Line 15 closes the file descriptor 3. #!/bin/bash cd /home/masud diff file1.txt file2.txt | cut -c3-13 > temporarylist.txt exec 3< “temporarylist.txt” || exit 1 while read i <&3; do scripts/othershellscript $i done exec 3<&-